Snubbed! South Carolina left out of College Football Playoff field in penultimate rankings

Barring a late miracle, South Carolina will not make this year’s College Football Playoff.

The Gamecocks currently sit at No. 14 — outside of the projected field — in the new CFP rankings released Tuesday night on ESPN.

With South Carolina idle this weekend, it has run out of opportunities to bolster its resume. And it does not appear the conference championship games, regardless of who wins, will open any room for teams currently out of the field to slide into it.

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South Carolina did its part to put the pressure on the committee.

Once considered a longshot to even sniff the field, South Carolina reeled off six straight wins, capped off with this weekend’s 17-14 victory over Clemson, which featured a game-winning fourth-quarterback touchdown from freshman sensation LaNorris Sellers.

The win catapulted the Gamecocks, previously No. 15, over the No. 12 Tigers but was not enough for them to break into the field. Assuming that holds, South Carolina will now turn its attention to an end-of-year bowl game in Florida.

Gamecock fans will no doubt still remember the year as a special one but will also be haunted by memories of the team’s 36-33 loss to LSU which featured several controversial calls against Carolina and an injury to Sellers that forced him to miss the second half.

South Carolina as an organization spent most of Tuesday campaigning on social media for the team’s inclusion in the field.

Head coach Shane Beamer made his case on the Paul Finebaum show.

“As far as our team goes, to me if the committee steps back and says right now at this moment, who are the 12 best teams in college football?” Beamer said. “It’s hard to argue that we’re not one of them in the fact that we’ve won six games in a row. I think four teams that we beat were ranked at the time we beat them. One of only three teams in the country that can say that.

“Our strength of schedule. We’ve gone on the road and we’ve won three times by a double-digit margin of victory, as well. And I just look at it as a coach. If I’m an opposing team and I see that South Carolina Gamecock logo pop up on the bracket as the team I’m playing in the first round, I can’t imagine there’s many coaches and teams that would be excited to play us right now. That’s just how I see it.”

Prior to this season, South Carolina was last ranked a Top 25 team by the CFP selection committee in 2022 when the Gamecocks were No. 20 in the final rankings after beating Tennessee and Clemson to finish the year.

Since the CFP era began, Carolina has been ranked two other times — once the week before in that same 2022 season and once during Week 13 of the 2017 season when the Gamecocks were ranked No. 24.

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This is the first season the College Football Playoff has expanded from four teams to 12.

As a reminder, the committee’s top 12 teams won’t correlate exactly with the 12-team field.

The CFP will consist of the top five highest-ranked conference champions and the next seven highest-ranked at-large schools. The top four conference champions will receive the top four seeds and a first-round bye. The fifth conference champion will be seeded by its CFP ranking. If that ranking is outside of the top 12 it will be seeded 12th as the final team in the field.

The teams seeded 5 through 12 will fight it out in the first round with the winners advancing to the quarterfinal round to face the top four seeds.

The final selection show is set for noon on Sunday on ESPN.

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